By Deborah Siegel
A new study warns that a Federal proposal to require a minimum 20 percent down payment of prospective of prospective homebuyers would substantially hurt the chances of many African Americans and Latinos to get such mortgages.

By Doug Miller
The study, Lost Ground, 2011,  found that low- and moderate-income African Americans and Latino Americans have suffered a disproportionate share of losses.

By Doug Miller
In the largest civil penalty it has ever issued, the Federal Reserve fined Wells Fargo & Co. $85 million to settle allegations that the San Francisco-based bank maneuvered borrowers into taking out costlier subprime home loans and falsified information on mortgage applications.

By Doug Miller
Black financial services customers all too often are part of a separate-but-unequal financial services economy.

By Doug Miller
African-American and Latino borrowers – already staggering under greater financial losses than whites in the wake of the U.S. mortgage foreclosure scandal – face an additional loss of an estimated $360 billion in cumulative family wealth from an associated decrease in neighborhood property values, according to recent testimony before Congress.

By Doug Miller
Lending institutions in California have foreclosed on African-American and Latino homeowners nearly twice as much as white property owners, according to a new study by the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), indicating that banks likely targeted those ethnic groups to receive more expensive and financially toxic subprime mortgages mortgages during the decade of the housing boom.

By Stacey Patton
Now, as the country braces for the possibility of a double-dip recession, additional spells of unemployment, and yet another wave of home foreclosures, a recent report by the New York Times found that the bulk of those dumping their mortgages are rich people.

They call it “strategic defaults.”

By Doug Miller
A tornado of foreclosures spawned by the subprime mortgage collapse has disproportionately flattened black and Hispanic homeowners, according to new research by the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), sucking hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth from communities of color.

By Beryl Satter
In the 1950s, speculators combed white neighborhoods, purchasing property from whites and then reselling them to blacks—at double to quadruple market value. Even worse, they sold these overpriced properties “on contract,” that is, on the installment plan. Black buyers made a down payment and were responsible for taxes, insurance, maintenance, and interest, but could lose the property if they missed even one payment. They were forced to accept such brutal terms, since in Chicago as nationally, most banks refused to loan to them; if they wanted to buy at all, they had to buy from speculators.